Description

SimCity is a reboot of the SimCity franchise. The basic idea is still the same as always: the player builds up a city from the ground and manages its budget and infrastructure by constructing buildings and streets. All those buildings have different functions, e.g. schools for education or power plants (no power lines anymore). New to the series is the upgrade system which allows to improve buildings in order to improve their range or capacity (mostly in exchange for more space), for example emergency services (police, fire and ambulance) can reach all places in the city and are only restricted in available vehicles. Other important aspects are zones (living, industry or commercial) which develop automatically depending on their location and surrounding infrastructure and traffic management with streets and public transportation systems.

The main difference to classic SimCity games is the regional system. The cities are restricted to relatively small maps which don't allow megacities and force industry specialisation. This means a city has to exchange resources (e.g. water, oil or police) with surrounding cities. There are up to 16 cities in each region which can also be founded by other players (this is the multiplayer component of the game).

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Controversy

At release, the game required a permanent internet connection to be played. While this decision was unpopular in itself, the controversy really started because EA's servers were completely overburdened after release and many players could not start their singleplayer game because they could not log in or the servers lost their savegames. According to Maxis, this was necessary because many calculations for the advanced simulation had to be outsourced to the servers. However, two revelations after release placed doubt to this statement:

The people of SimCity are not individually simulated and just choose a random place to work/live on the go. There is also no traffic simulation besides "shortest way to the goal".

Shortly after release there was an unofficial offline patch and the game functioned just as well for 20 minutes until an internal timer kicked in.